The biggest challenge for a person with physical limitation such as auditory, speech and visual difficulties i.e. deaf-dumb or blind individual is to communicate with individual having similar disabilities and with other normal individuals. Particularly, deaf individuals can't hear the speech communicated to them and dumb individuals are unable to communicate. This gap in communication and associated problems are generally solved by use of sign language, facial expression, lip reading or written communication means, which are typically meant for personal communication with relatively less proximity between the individuals participating in the communication.
Further these means of communication is restricted to either trained individuals who can decipher the presentation of information in such abstract mode of communication. However, the said communication problem is more pronounced in a communication between disabled and normal individual.
Another hindrance for the deaf-dumb individuals is to communicate with the normal individuals without the knowledge of sign language. In such hindrances, they depend on written form of communication. However, for deaf and dumb individuals with reading and writing limitations, written communication is difficult.
Another hindrance for deaf-dumb individuals is to communicate with the visually impaired individual, who cannot read or see the sign language.
The communication between individual in remote places is all the more difficult. Though lots of means for remote communication including mobile phone are available, they are of less use for individuals with visual impairments and speaking difficulties. Generally, deaf-dumb individuals are restricted to use the short message service to communicate through the mobile phones, in which the individual at remote location is also required to type the message. This is time consuming and moreover it requires both the individuals to posses reading and writing capabilities. Hence there is an urgent need to provide such individuals with a means to communicate with similarly disabled individuals and normal individuals.
Some of the inventions which deal to provide communication aid and methods for individuals with hearing and visual impairments:
U.S. Pat. No. 4,596,899 teaches a portable telephone hearing aid having an acousto-acoustic/magnetic amplifier providing a maximum gain of 20 dB has a circular housing at one end of a U-shaped resilient clip member for attaching it to the telephone receiver in a handset. This ‘U’ shape hearing aid that can be coupled with telephone to provide assistance in hearing for individuals with worn hearing aid and for individuals in noisy environment. Though the '899 patent discloses a method or communication aid for deaf people but fails to disclose a method or communication system for deaf-dumb or speechless individuals to particularly communicate with normal individuals.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,047,952 teaches a communication system for deaf, deaf-blind and non vocal individuals, which includes an instrumented glove for obtaining electrical signals indicative of a hand configuration of a first individual. The elements used to communicate the output includes, voice synthesizer, LED monitor or Braille display. Other components of the invention includes voice recognition, Wrist watch LCD monitor, instrumented gloves for providing inputs by deaf and deaf-blind individuals. A portable keyboard can be used by the normal individual to communicate with the individual with disability. Though the '952 patent discloses communication system for deaf, deaf-blind and non vocal individuals for personal interaction, but it cannot be used or implemented for remote communication specifically via telephone or cell phone.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,524,056 teach a hearing aid comprises and combines an omni-directional and a one directional microphone using a switching circuit, hearing aid amplifier and an equalizer circuit. The switching circuit is proposed to be automatically switching between the microphones depending upon the ambient noise levels. The '056 patent discloses a hearing aid only for the deaf individuals, but fails to disclose a communication aid for deaf-dumb and visually impaired individuals.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,993,474 discloses a compact and portable interactive system for allowing person-to-person communication in a typed language format between individuals experiencing language barriers such as the hearing impaired and language impaired. It discloses a custom laptop specially designed to cater to the individuals with hearing and language difficulties. It includes two keyboards and screens on the either side of laptop. The display screen will further have a split configuration, i.e., a double screen, either top/bottom or left/right depicting chat boxes, each chat box dedicated to a user. The mechanism to translate the language among the many available options before displaying it can be provided with the present invention. Thus one chat box will display text in one language while the other will display in other language. This invention is restricted to face to face communication only. The '474 patent discloses a face to face communication means, but cannot be used or implemented in remote communication as well as for individuals with read-write difficulties.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,027,986 discloses a method and an apparatus for providing automated speech-to-text encoding and decoding for hearing-impaired persons, wherein the broadband subscriber terminal interfaces to: (a) a network to convey speech packets there over, (b) a telephone to convey speech information, and (c) a display device to display textual information of spoken words. Though the '986 patent discloses speech to text encoding and decoding, it restrict use of the equipment for receiving only text or speech inputs. Inputting text requires lot of time and is practically not useful for individuals with speaking difficulties.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,356,473 discloses a computer-aided communication and assistance system that uses a signal processing and other algorithms in a processor in wireless communication with a microphone system to aid a deaf person, wherein an instrumented communication module receives information from one or more microphones and provides textual and, optionally, stimulatory information to the deaf person. The '473 patent use external hardware to convey the speech signals of other person in defined vicinity, which uses speech to text conversion. Such modality is useful for deaf or visually impaired person; however, the said modality may not work in certain severe cases where individual may possess both hearing and visual impairments.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,607,097 discloses a method for incorporating emotional information in a communication stream by receiving an emotional state indicator indicating an emotional state of a presenter in a communication session, retrieving a cultural profile for the presenter, retrieving a plurality of cultural profiles corresponding to each of several recipients in the communication session, for each recipient, translating the emotional state indicator into a corresponding emoticon according to a difference between the cultural profile of the presenter and the cultural profile of each recipient, merging the translated emoticon into a copy of the communication session, and presenting communication session and merged translated emoticon to each recipient. The '097 patent discloses about identifying the emotions from the facial expressions, speech recognition and physical gestures. However, the communication cues originating from these emotions are limited in articulating the actual speech or message; whereas there is a strong requirement for recognition and conversion of a leap movements and hand gestures including sign language into text and further text to speech.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,664,531 discloses an information processing apparatus, which provides communication and exchanging images with a different information processing apparatus, and comprises a storage unit for storing a display pattern dictionary including one or a plurality of finger character images, each finger character image corresponding to a character and/or a numeral and representing a finger character, an operation unit for inputting a character and/or a numeral, an image selecting unit for selecting, from the display pattern dictionary, a finger character image corresponding to the character and/or numeral input by the operation unit, and a transmitting unit for transmitting the selected finger character image to the different information processing apparatus. The '531 patent discloses a communication means for deaf person to communicate with other deaf person over a mobile phone. It primarily converts the signs into codes to be transmitted at remote locations; the input sign language is mapped to a key pad at the caller's mobile. The transmitted information at the receiver mobile again needs to convert the transmitted codes into certain intelligible form, hence requiring modification to be carried out in both the mobile phones participating in the said communication. This particular aspect restricts the universal application of the communication means for disabled individuals. Hence there is an urgent requirement for an universal communication means for disabled individual whereby such disabled individual would able to communicate with rest of the world without bothering about the technology modification required at the other ends.
In the present invention we propose a novel approach with additional functionalities in the existing communication aid to overcome all the above mentioned limitations for individual with hearing and speaking difficulties.
In light of the above mentioned prior arts it is evident that there is a need to have a customizable solution to individuals with physical limitation such as hearing difficulties i.e. deaf and dumb or visually impaired individuals to communicate with each other as well as normal individuals.
In order to address the long felt need of such a solution, the present invention provides hand-held communication aid and method that assists the deaf-dumb and visually impaired individuals to communicate with normal individuals.